While many aspects of EverQuest Next appear redefining and revolutionary – and to be fair, some of them genuinely are – consumers have seen some of these features before.

The dizzying and admittedly dazzling promises laid out during presentation and panel paint a picture of an aberrant Frankengame stitched together from hunks of current-gen action-MMORPGs, Guild Wars 2, Minecraft, and an ever increasing reliance on user-generated content to keep MMO audiences engaged. In fact, some aspects of EverQuest Next can already be explored at a sort of ground level view in Picroma’s two-person project Cube World.

As for the aspects such as emergent AI, players involved with content creation, procedurally generated voxel content - Does EverQuest Next risk too much by throwing off the trappings of the traditional MMORPG that the original EverQuest itself popularized and laid out for Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft to cannibalize and reshape?

Is it actually entering the realm of mad ambition to try to push out a procedurally generated voxel MMORPG with emergent AI? Role definitions thrown out the window with 40 mixable classes? No levels or level cap? Pets for everyone? What is this? It’s almost disingenuous to call it a MMORPG by the current common usage of the term. It has the potential to be rather terrifying, as current consumers of MMOs will realize rather quickly that this is EverQuestin name and lore alone.

While current consumers can claim they’re looking for something other than the core MMORPG experience currently offered by titles like World of Warcraft, the title still commands 7.7 million subscribers.

If EverQuest Next succeeds it will truly offer consumers a markedly different MMO experience. The questions are: Will it work? When will EverQuest Next launch? Will all of these features be present at launch? Despite the careful wording in this interview, it’s fairly safe to mark it a probable title for next-gen console as well.

At the moment EverQuest Next is an idyllic dream, a concept promising the stars and the sky. Time will tell whether it spurs the next big MMORPG revolution, gets stuck in limbo with other ambitious sandbox open-world attempts, or tapers off in the face of the very games the franchise fathered.